“NASA’ s Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet website features a diverse set of resources related to the measurement, analysis, and dangers of global climate change. Here readers will find a collection of Interactive Features all designed to bring to life the sometimes abstract conclusions of scientific articles on climate and its effects on human and other life on Earth. For example, the Climate Time Machine allows readers to go backward and forward through four different key climate indicators, including Sea Ice, Sea Level, Carbon Dioxide, and Global Temperature. Perfect for educators who are looking for impactful visual representations of the rising temperatures on the planet, the interactive makes these measurements visceral in a way that charts and graphs are seldom able to do. Other interactives on the page include the Global Ice Viewer, Quizzes, The Sun: A Virtual Tour, The Water Cycle, and others. [CNH]”

From GEN’s “Best of the Web”, Jan. 15, 2014, there is a glowing review of http://www.bioinformatics.org which makes available an assortment of resources for everyone, from beginners to experts. There is introductory information, databases, software development projects, and analytical tools, such as PrimerX, which automate the design of mutagenic PCR primers.

"… Indiana University is spending $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health on…high-end computing discovery tools. The Hoosiers’ Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center is targeting cloud computing to support life science research.

In addition to busting computing bottlenecks, the center plans to use the cloud for analyzing sequencing data, the volume of which is "one to two orders of magnitude larger than possible with current computational capabilities," according to an industry article. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other open source software are expected to be part of the installation.

The center’s research team will partner with IU life science research teams to test the platform in such research areas as sequence assembly and population genomics. Cloud technologies will also be applied to gene family clustering and structural visualization.

The IU work is also supported by the National Science Foundation via its FutureGrid experimental supercomputing network project."